What class action can do for us regular people

Given everything that’s going on in the news, why bother with this item from 538 Significant Digits?

Because, among other laws, rules, regulations, bodies and rights threatened by the Supreme Court’s right wing, there is class action. If Kavanaugh gets on the court, successful class action lawsuits like this against massive and powerful corporations — note the case began “over a decade ago” — might go away:

$6 billion settlement

Speaking of banks and stuff, Visa and Mastercard will pay some $6 billion to put an end to one branch of a two-pronged price-fixing case. The case began over a decade ago, with merchants accusing Visa and Mastercard of conspiring to inflate the “swipe fees” that the merchants paid when they swiped a customer’s card. It is, according to Bloomberg, the largest class-action settlement of an antitrust case. [Bloomberg]